Human Rights

London, 01 Mar - Sweden recently granted citizenship to a disaster medicine expert currently on death row in Iran, with the hopes that it will allow the Swedish Foreign Ministry to intervene in the case and get the doctor released.

Dr. Ahmadreza Djalali, who taught at the Karolinska Institute of Medicine in Stockholm and worked in the research department of the Free University Brussels (VUB), visited Iran for a medical conference in 2016, where he was arrested and charged with spying for Israel. In October 2017, he was tried and sentenced to death.

Human Rights Watch reported that Iran executed at least three child offenders across the country in January 2018. Human Rights Watch called on Iran to immediately and unconditionally end the use of the death penalty for crimes committed by children under the age of 18, and move toward a complete ban on capital punishment.

The organization named the three young people that were executed in January as Amirhossein Pourjafar, Ali Kazemi and Mahboubeh Mofidi. They were executed for crimes they allegedly committed when they were 16, 15 and 17 years old respectively.

This execution was illegal under Iranian law, according to Amnesty, because no notice of the execution was given to Kazemi’s lawyer.

In a letter to the United Nations human rights rapporteur on January 31, the political prisoner Arash Sadeghi, who is on hunger strike, warned about the situation of Atena Daemi and Golkorki Iraee, while accusing five authorities of the Iranian regime's Prisons Organization.